54621A Agilent Digital Oscilloscope

The 54621A is a 60 MHz, 2 channel digital oscilloscope from Agilent. Measure voltage or current signals over time in an electronic circuit or component to display amplitude, frequency and rise times, etc. Applications include troubleshooting, production test, and design.

If you work with both analog and digital components, Agilent Technologies 54600-Series oscilloscopes can help you easily see more of what's going on in your designs. The unique 2 + 16-channel mixed signal oscilloscope (MSO) models and the traditional 2- and 4-channel models are optimized with just the capabilities you need for verifying and debugging designs that include A/Ds, D/As, DSPs, and embedded 8- or 16-bit microcontrollers.

These scopes give you the tools you need to solve your mixed analog and digital engineering challenges more easily.

The 2-channel model 54621A brings all the benefits of MegaZoom deep memory, high-definition display, and flexible triggering to those value-minded designers with lower channel requirements. They give you an affordable way to see long time periods while maintaining high sample rate so you can see details in your designs.

Ideal for mixed analog and digital analysisIdeal for analyzing designs with both analog and digital components, the 54600-Series scopes combine three critical features:

Up to 8 MB of MegaZoom deep memory on some models comes standard so you can capture long, non-repeating signals, maintain high sample rate, and quickly zoom in on areas of interest

A revolutionary ultra-responsive, high-definition display that lets you see more signal detail than ever before

This combination of capabilities is tailored to give you the measurement power you need to get your mixed analog and digital job done faster.

MegaZoom deep memoryWith 4 MB to 8 MB of MegaZoom deep memory, 54600-Series scopes give you deep-memory capture without the sluggish response and complex operation you’ve had to tolerate with other deep-memory scopes. And unlike the alternatives, MegaZoom deep memory is not a special mode. That means it’s always available to help you find details buried in complex signals, discover anomalies, correlate high-speed digital control signals with slower analog signals and capture infrequent events.

The dilemma of having to trigger twice to get a long time capture or to see detailed resolution is solved with MegaZoom deep memory as you can have both with a single measurement. Deep memory means that the sample rate stays high even when capturing long time periods.

The 54600-Series scopes are the only deep-memory scopes that respond instantly to your control inputs with a fast, responsive display. Compare them to other scopes in this price range – only the 54600-Series provides deep memory at an affordable price.

Revolutionary high-definition display helps you see detailsCombine MegaZoom deep memory with a patented high-definition display system, and you will see subtle details that most scopes won’t show you. The MegaZoom deep memory is mapped into 32 levels of intensity on a display that has twice the horizontal resolution and update rates of up to 25 million vectors per second – so you see a more realistic representation of your signals.

There is less chance to miss a narrow occasional transient, less chance to miss a glitch or distorted edge that impacts circuit operation, and less chance to miss all those subtle details that can take weeks to find with a traditional digital scope.

Standard featuresAgilent 54600-Series scopes include the standard features you need to get your job done easier and faster.

Connectivity made easier

Parallel and RS-232 interfaces make connection to printers and PCs a snap. And the 54600-Series scopes come with standard parallel and RS-232 interfaces on the rear panel. For faster data transfers, an optional GPIB interface module is also available.

IntuiLink, a free software application, simplifies PC connectivity when you need to transfer images and waveform data to your PC. IntuiLink lets you focus more time on design issues rather than on programming. With the click of a button on IntuiLink’s toolbar, you can download data or insert a snapshot of an oscilloscope screen directly into your Microsoft® Excel spreadsheets or Word documents, or save the image as a bitmap file. Once the data is in an Excel spreadsheet, you can leverage Excel’s extensive analysis functions to create custom graphs and views.

Built-in floppy driveA built-in 1.44 MB floppy drive makes it easy for you to store waveform data, screen images, and scope setups. You can store your waveform images as TIF or BMP files and your waveform data as ASCII files for easy import into other PC applications. If you share your lab equipment with others, you can save your measurement setups and traces to diskette, making it simple to reproduce your every-day setups as well as your advanced configurations.

Built-in help at your fingertipsAn innovative built-in help system in 11 different languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Russian, and Portuguese) gives you quick access to the help you need. If you have a question about a particular feature, simply press and hold the corresponding frontpanel key for a few seconds, and a help screen pops up to explain its function. You’ll no longer have to look for the manual when you need assistance setting up scope functions or making complex measurements.

Deep memory transfer over the busTransfer all of your data over the bus, even when using deep memory. Typical transfer time is <70 seconds for 2 MB of data over GPIB.The 54640-Series requires software revision 1.0 or later. The 54620-Series requires software revision 1.5 or later. The system software is stored in FLASH ROM that can be upgraded easily from a built-in floppy disk drive in the scope.

Other standard features

Waveform math with FFTs: Analysis functions include -, *, Integrate, and Differentiate, as well as Fast Fourier Transforms.

1-ns peak detect on the54640-Series and 5-ns peak detect on the 54620-Series means you won’t have to worry about missing narrow glitches.

Autoscale lets you quickly display any active signals, automatically setting the vertical, horizontal and trigger controls for the best display.

Printer connectivity is easy for HP Deskjets, LaserJets, Epson, or integrated thermal printer option with the standard parallel port on the rear panel.

High resolution mode offers up to 12 bits of resolution in real-time (single-shot) modes, reducing noise. This is accomplished by averaging sequential data points and mapping the average to the display when at slow sweep speeds.

Flexible TriggeringWith mixed analog and digital designs, sometimes it is hard to trace an anomaly back to its root cause unless you can trigger on it and correlate it with another signal. With the 54600-Series scopes, triggering is no longer a hassle. They come with flexible triggering capabilities across all channels so you can easily isolate and analyze complex signals and interactions common in your mixed analog and digital designs.

CAN, LIN, and USB TriggeringController Area Network (CAN) and Universal Serial Bus (USB) triggering comes standard with the 54600-Series scopes. These triggering modes make it easy to synchronize CAN, LIN, and USB frames. Don’t waste time finding the start of the complex frames – let Agilent do it for you.

CAN triggering synchronizes to the start of a CAN frame on any CAN high or CAN low signal.

Trigger on LIN (local interconnect network) sync break at the beginning of a message frame.

USB is quickly becoming the connection of choice for PC peripherals. Make your testing easy with Start of Packet (SOP), End of Packet (EOP), Reset Complete (RC), Enter Suspend, or Exit Suspend modes.

The N2758A CAN trigger module option enables the MSO to isolate and trigger on a particular frame’s content.

I²C and SPI TriggeringDon’t spend your time sorting through communication frames to find the one of interest. Let Agilent set up an Inter-Integrated Circuit (I2C) or Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) trigger to sift through the frames for you. And like the CAN, LIN, and USB triggers, I2C and SPI come standard with the 54600-Series scopes.

The full range of I²C triggering includes start or stop condition, missing acknowledge, restart, EEPROM data read, address and/or data frame, or 10-bit write. SPI triggering allows for trigger on user-definable framing and user-definable number of bits per frame, as well as data patterns.

Microcontroller and DSP ApplicationsMicrocontrollers (MCUs) and Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) are here to stay, and are becoming more pervasive in industrial, communications, automobile, and consumer products. Design engineers must grapple with scopes that were not developed to tackle the mixed analog and digital signals found in MCU- and DSP-based designs. Many engineers, who rely primarily on typical 2-channel or 4-channel scopes in mixed analog and digital signal verification and debug, find these scopes to be inadequate when it comes to the channel count, memory depth, display and triggering. The interactions that occur in typical mixed analog and digital design — taking a realworld signal such as audio, video, temperature or pressure, performing some transformation on the signal, and finally returning that signal to the real world — require more viewing capability than current scopes can provide.